The present invention concerns electrolytic capacitors, particularly those for use in medical devices, such as implantable defibrillators.
Every year more than half a million people in the United States suffer from heart attacks, more precisely cardiac arrests. Many of these cardiac arrests stem from the heart chaotically twitching, or fibrillating, and thus failing to rhythmically expand and contract as necessary to pump blood. Fibrillation can cause complete loss of cardiac function and death within minutes. To restore normal heart contraction and expansion, paramedics and other medical workers use a device, called a defibrillator, to electrically shock a fibrillating heart.
Since the early 1980s, thousands of patients prone to fibrillation episodes have had miniature defibrillators implanted in their bodies, typically in the left breast region above the heart. These implantable defibrillators detect onset of fibrillation and automatically shock the heart, restoring normal heart function without human intervention. A typical implantable defibrillator includes a set of electrical leads, which extend from a sealed housing into the heart of a patient after implantation. Within the housing are a battery for supplying power, heart-monitoring circuitry for detecting fibrillation, and a capacitor for storing and delivering a burst of electric charge through the leads to the heart.
The capacitor is typically an aluminum electrolytic capacitor, which includes two long strips of aluminum foil with two long strips of paper, known as separators, in between them. One of the aluminum foils serves as a cathode (negative) foil, and the other serves as an anode (positive) foil. Each foil has an aluminum tab, extending from its top edge, to facilitate electrical connection to other parts of the capacitor.
The foil-and-paper assembly, known as the active element, is rolled around a removable spindle or mandrel to form a cylinder and placed in a round tubular case, with the two tabs extending toward the top of the case. The paper is soaked, or impregnated, with a liquid electrolyte—a very electrically conductive solution containing positive or negative ions. And, the tubular case is sealed shut with a lid called a header. Extending from the header are two terminals connected respectively to the anode foil and cathode foil via the aluminum tabs.
In recent years, manufacturers of aluminum electrolytic capacitors have focused almost single-mindedly on improving the active element by developing aluminum foils, electrolytes, and multiple-anode arrangements that improve capacitor performance, specifically energy density—the amount of energy or charge a capacitor stores per unit volume. For example, because energy density is directly proportional to the surface area of the aluminum foil making up the capacitive element, manufacturers have focused on methods of etching microscopic hills and valleys into foils to increase their effective surface area.
In comparison, capacitor manufacturers have made little, if any, effort to improve packaging of the active element. For example, three leading manufactures of electrolytic capacitors—Rubycon, United Chemicon, and Roederstein—presently provide 330–360 volt, dual-anode aluminum electrolytic capacitors which have total volumes greater than about 6.5 cubic-centimeters (which is roughly the same size as a AA battery.) Yet, when the present inventors studied how this space was used, they determined that the ratio of the volume of the active element to the overall volume of these capacitors was only about 40 percent. Thus, the inventors concluded that about 60 percent of the total capacitor volume was wasted in the sense of failing to directly contribute to the performance of these electrolytic capacitors.
Accordingly, the inventors identified an unmet need to reduce the size of electrolytic capacitors, especially those intended for implantable defibrillators, through better packaging.